"Kit Reed - What Wolves Know" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Kit)

picked Happy out of the stroller and dropped him at SoniaтАЩs feet. The pack
took the message and backed off. He has been running with them ever
since.

The first thing Sonia did was rip off his little outfit with her teeth and
lick him raw so he would smell of her and not the other pack, the one he
quickly forgot. The only thing left of them was the scrap of metal dangling
from his neck. Timbo wanted that off too. Even though he was the leader,
Sonia rolled back her lips and snarled. It stayed. Happy ran with the wolves
but the cold square tap-tapped on naked flesh, a sign that he was different.
Sonia fed her new pup off her sagging belly and licked his tears away. Then
she dragged him through dirt and rotting dead things until he was fit to run
with the other cubs and from that night on she was his mother. The rule of
the pack is: never get between a cub and its mother. He knew he was
loved.

Timbo did not love Happy, but he protected him.

In time the pack forgot that he was not one of them. Howling to stay in
touch, they ran at night, ah-whooo, ranging wide, ah-whoooooo, and with
the knife he found on a dead man, Happy was as good a hunter as any.
Even Timbo came to respect him. This, he thought, was all there was to life.
The howling and the hunting, Happy and his litter-mates running free in the
night.

When you are raised by wolves but are not one of them, time is never
what you think. You do not age at the same rate.

Happy he was, yet living with the wolves, nursing injuries when his
litter-mates grew up and the challenges began, Happy thought: This canтАЩt
be my real family. Some day my father the duke and my mother the
movie star will come for me. Where did these words come from? Who
were his people, really?

The litters he ran with grew up much, much faster than Happy.

It was a mystery. The other cubs grew tall and rangy while he was still
an awkward pup. They flirted and rutted, things Happy thought he
understood and longed for vaguely but was not built to do. He was shaped
all wrong, too young in ways Sonia would not explain to him; she was, after
all, a mother and there are things mothers keep from you until itтАЩs time. His
litter-mates frolicked and did things Happy was not yet old enough to do.
When he tried to play they snapped: donтАЩt bother me. In time, he played
with their cubs. Their cubs grew up. Sonia got old. Then Sonia died, and
with Sonia gone, craggy Timbo began stalking him, licking his chops.

Now Happy was old enough to do all those things he had been too
young to do before, and Timbo?

Timbo had to die. Happy had reached the age of kill or be killed.